


Articulation

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Wednesday One-Shots [17]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Issues of Disability, M/M, Paralysis, Present Tense, mentions of BDSM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-29 04:09:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6358768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry being disabled might mean that Harry and Draco have to give up certain types of sex. It doesn’t mean the end of their relationship—at least as far as Draco is concerned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This is another Wednesday one-shot written for phonixfeder, who asked for Harry and Draco being in a BDSM relationship with Harry as the sub and Draco as the Dom until Harry is disabled in a way that makes some of their sex impossible. It will have two parts, the second to be posted next week.

Draco remembers the way Harry felt beneath him.  
  
He could use almost anything to bind Harry—chains, ropes, the silken bedsheets that he’d brought back from Malfoy Manor when Harry once whispered to him about a certain decadent desire, magical bonds that had no tangible presence and caused no chafing. What really kept Harry tied was his own ardent will, in line with Draco’s, for him to lie there.  
  
And Draco sometimes spanked him, and sometimes lay beside him teasing him idly with one fingertip until Harry writhed with his lip between his teeth, and sometimes only waited, eyes on Harry’s back, until he was satisfied that Harry could obey a simple command. That might include waiting, not moving, speaking what he was thinking, touching himself with one free hand…it varied from night to night and morning to morning. Harry liked it as much as he did.  
  
That was the only thing that made their relationship possible.  
  
Draco stands in front of Harry’s bed at St. Mungo’s, studying him in silence, and can say nothing when he sees the way Harry tries to shift in his sleep, and his legs…simply don’t move with the rest of him.   
  
Oh, yes, Draco can remember.  
  
*  
  
Not that remembering does any good as he watches Harry try to heave himself out of bed. They start this way every morning, with Harry insisting that he wants to try to walk.   
  
Draco stands back and lets him try. He bites the corner of his lips, the inside of his cheek, his tongue, his own teeth. Sometimes he has to go aside during the day and cast Healing Charms on the sores he’s inflicted on his tongue and the insides of his mouth.  
  
But it works. He never says anything while Harry tries to place his feet flat on the floor, having to look down to do it. He remains silent while Harry loops an arm around the iron circles of the headboard, and looks again, and hauls. He looks and doesn’t speak as Harry balances, pulled only by the force of his arms, wavering.  
  
He casts a spell that catches Harry before he crashes back to the floor, if it looks like he’s going to. If Harry falls back on the bed, Draco goes over and gently moves his legs into a comfortable position before he fetches the floating chair.   
  
If Harry turns his head to the side and cries angry tears in the time that Draco’s gone, that’s something Draco doesn’t need to speak of, either.  
  
*  
  
The Healers did try to offer Harry new legs. But all they could have done was give him wooden legs like the one Moody had—useless, when Harry couldn’t walk and the wooden legs would only make him more unsteady—and cure the scars and wounds on his original ones—which they did.  
  
They can’t reconnect Harry’s spine, which is what needs to happen, for arcane reasons with lots of Muggle terms that Draco can only guess at. It was severed when the building fell on him.  
  
The building brought down by Dark wizards who were so desperate to avoid capture that they were evidently willing to die. They cast the curses that weakened the ceiling and the walls. Draco got there when the dust was still drifting in the air, the twin of the bracelet he gave Harry for his last birthday suddenly heating on his wrist when he was in the middle of examining one of the equations his apprentice had created.  
  
He still remembers what it was like, to float rubble and wood up, ignoring the cries of Aurors who tried to tell him there were other people trapped in there, too. He remembers finding Harry, still, his eyes half-open, instead of either properly open or closed.  
  
Harry was trapped between one room and another, shielded from part of the falling building even as the rest of it crushed his spine. Trapped his legs. Made it impossible for him to feel or move anything below the waist.  
  
They can cope more easily than Muggles. A floating chair instead of a wheelchair. Spells to make sure Harry’s comfortable, doesn’t fall, and no longer suffers any pain and _didn’t_ suffer any long-lasting infections or scars. Even spells to remove the liquid from his bladder so he doesn’t have to go to the bathroom without someone to lift him on to the loo.  
  
Not that Harry wants that. He would rather simply cast the spell himself if Draco’s not around, every hour on the clock.   
  
Harry, who used to never want to depend on anyone for anything, who took years to surrender to Draco’s care for him and accept that Draco really _did_ find that surrender exciting, is the worst possible candidate Draco can think of for this kind of survival.  
  
He knows Harry wishes he had died. And yet, Draco doesn’t agree, even as he has his horrid thoughts and lies awake at night listening to Harry’s breathing and not reaching out a hand in comfort because Harry would shrink from it.  
  
Harry is still alive. That means something else can happen.  
  
Maybe. If they will ever let it.  
  
*  
  
“Leave me alone for one day.”  
  
Draco hesitates when he hears those words, about to come into the kitchen. Harry is wielding his wand to butter and cut his toast, and then to float it over on a plate to the table. The look he turns on Draco is so stubborn that Draco finds himself falling back before he thinks about it, raising one hand almost as a shield.  
  
“You’re sure?” It’s the only question Draco can ask, and all it gains him is a tightening of Harry’s lips and the way that his hands close on the knife and fork as if he’d like to use them as artificial legs.  
  
“I’m sure. Your apprentice’s training is suffering, anyway.” Harry gives him a smile that is a parody of the one he had before the accident. “How can you expect Natalie to become a good Arithmancer if you continually neglect her education?”  
  
“She’s offered to come here. I’ve offered to host her lessons here.” Harry knows that, of course, and it’s an effort for Draco to keep his voice neutral. He _has_ worried about Natalie’s lessons. He studied Arithmancy after the war, published a few critical papers, and suddenly had people who wanted to study with him. Natalie is the latest in a long line of apprentices, and she’s paid well for the privilege.  
  
But of course Harry hasn’t wanted anyone to see him.  
  
“Kreacher will bring me anything I can’t reach or float to.” Harry will use the floating chair, but he doesn’t like it. Draco knows he doesn’t like crossing a room unless he can do it with his feet pressed against the floor, looking down to make sure they’re going in the right direction.  
  
“Well. If you’re sure.” Draco pauses near the door. He knows it’s ridiculous, really. Harry knows all the right spells, and Kreacher could help him into the chair if he fell out of it, or the bed, or an ordinary chair. Really, now that he thinks of it, Draco isn’t sure why he felt compelled to spend every minute with Harry before now.  
  
“I’m sure.” Harry gives him a brittle smile that nevertheless glitters as bright as sugar. “Go and enjoy your day, Draco.”  
  
It’s only when he’s deep in the throes of an equation Natalie couldn’t solve that Draco understands why he didn’t want to leave. Harry thinks that Draco can’t enjoy a day spent with _him_ , not anymore.  
  
In the middle of the afternoon, when he _has_ to Floo Kreacher, Draco understands another reason. He keeps thinking that as long as he’s there, no other building can fall on Harry.  
  
*  
  
“No.”  
  
Harry says the single word, pushes him away with a single hand. But Draco would respect far weaker barriers than that.  
  
It’s the frozen tone in Harry’s voice that shuts him out completely. Draco turns and sits sideways with his legs dangling off the bed. He saw, earlier, how Harry’s eyes darted down to his groin and then away, and his face almost drained of blood.  
  
Looking at the wall, Draco asks simply, “Why?”  
  
“Because _I can’t feel anything below the waist._ ”  
  
Draco closes his eyes. Then he says, “I knew that.”  
  
“And you wanted to have sex _anyway_?”  
  
Draco turns back. They have to have this conversation looking each other in the eye, even if Harry keeps turning his head. The way he’s propped up in bed, he can’t turn far enough away to avoid Draco. “Yes. I thought you could touch me, since you can still move your hands. And I could touch you above the waist.”  
  
“What good would that do?”  
  
“What good…” Draco is lost. Obviously things have changed and they can’t do everything the way they used to. But he thought they could at least bring each other some pleasure.  
  
“I can’t feel it even if I can still come,” Harry says, and his head turns enough that Draco knows he must be straining his neck. “What good is it?”  
  
Draco finds a sour stickiness in his throat, and he doesn’t know where it came from. He coughs to clear it out and mutters, “I thought that our sex wasn’t all about orgasms. That was what you told me that evening I teased you and put you to bed in handcuffs and then I thought I went too far, and you said that was fine, that was exactly what you wanted sometimes, and I was—”  
  
“We can’t _do that anymore_. So what does it matter?”  
  
Draco stares at him. Harry keeps looking away. And the thought of him in this kind of pain isn’t exciting. It was only ever exciting when it was shared between them, and Draco was the one who got to choose how much there was, because Harry trusted him to find the balance.  
  
Numbed, Draco stands up slowly. “Would you prefer I sleep somewhere else?” he asks quietly.  
  
Harry sits there with his head turned away.  
  
“Somewhere I can’t bother you?”  
  
Harry sits there with his head turned away.  
  
In the end, Draco can’t just walk out of the bedroom they’ve shared for so many years. He conjures another bed beside Harry’s, and lies down, closing his eyes. He won’t open them again, he’s decided. He won’t look.  
  
“I’m here if you need anything during the night.”  
  
Harry doesn’t reply, and Draco breaks his promise to himself and opens his eyes. At least Harry is lying in the bed with his face turned up towards the ceiling, and that’s likely to be less strain on his neck.  
  
It’s the only consolation Draco finds that night.  
  
*  
  
“I wonder if I should move out.”  
  
Draco feels his shoulders tighten so fast that they send shocks of pain down his spine. But he moderates his breathing and only says, “If you think that’s best.”  
  
“ _I_ should make the decisions about myself.”  
  
Draco turns around. Harry is in his floating chair by the window, gripping the sill in the way he used to when he was contemplating some sins of the Auror Department. But in those distant times three months ago, he was standing. And now, if he goes back to the Auror Department, they’ll have him doing paperwork.  
  
Draco knows Harry won’t be able to stand it.  
  
“If you think you should,” Draco manages to say, working his tongue loose from where it’s braided around his teeth, “then of course you should.”  
  
“You sound condescending.”  
  
“It’s a decision you have to make yourself.” Draco sets down the half of a grapefruit he’s been eating. Harry used to always make faces at it, so Draco took to eating it on the windowsill during the mornings when he wants it. But this new Harry doesn’t seem to think about it or care at all. “You’ve made it clear that you don’t really trust me to help participate in those decisions.”  
  
“I never said that!” Harry swings the floating chair to face him.   
  
“What we had was based on _trust_ ,” Draco tells him, wanting to snarl. “Not just the part where I tied you up and did what we both liked. _Every_ part! Or you wouldn’t have agreed to trust yourself to a Malfoy, and move in with me, and date me when the press disapproved and everyone else in Diagon Alley stared. You would have done the easy thing, or just never given me a chance in the first place, if you didn’t trust me.  
  
“It’s fine you for to change your mind.” Draco strives with the words, but says them. He wouldn’t have said them before the accident. Harry made it clear then that he wanted to be tied by stronger bonds. But this is a new Harry. The building’s fall shattered old promises, too, that’s clear now, not just Harry’s spine. “But I have the right to know what you’re going to do.”  
  
Harry stares at him with those wild eyes. Draco just stands there. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is, to try and influence Harry’s decision or not. Nothing makes any sense, either way.   
  
He waits, and Harry turns the floating chair and zips out of the dining room. Draco just stands and watches his breakfast dishes until Kreacher comes to clear them away.  
  
*  
  
When Draco gets home that evening from his lessons with Natalie, Harry, his floating chair, and some of his clothes are gone.  
  
Kreacher is the one who hands him the letter that Harry left propped against the pillow on his side of the bed. Draco tears it open with hands that he knows are shaking. He bites his lip and tries to remain collected as he reads it.  
  
 _Dear Draco,_  
  
 _I need some time to think. I’ve gone to Grimmauld Place, and I’ve asked Kreacher to come and help me when you aren’t home. He’ll be happy to split his duties between two houses for a while, I think. There’s not that much that needs to be done in any one place, but two will make him busier._  
  
 _And I’m sorry that I can’t stay with you right now. I need to think. I don’t want to leave, but to prevent a permanent separation, I need one right now._  
  
 _So many things have changed. I need to decide what I want, though, because you’re right. You can’t decide for me. And I would end up resenting you if you tried._  
  
 _Let me have this space. I’ll let you know what I’ve decided one way or the other soon. And we can talk by the Floo this evening._  
  
 _Love,_  
 _Harry_.  
  
Draco runs his finger along the top of the letter, and breathes out. It heartens him that Harry has said he doesn’t want to leave.  
  
It’s the only thing that lets him remain calm as he goes about this evening routine, in fact. And several times he looks at the fireplace.  
  
But he has to hold back. He has to let Harry contact him of his own free will.  
  
Harry’s will and desire, mingled with his, is what let them trust each other in the first place. And Draco wants that back far more than he wants Harry to be an Auror again, or able to feel, or able to walk.


	2. Part Two

Harry does a lot of lying in bed and thinking, over the next few days.  
  
If anyone had told him three months ago that he would leave Draco to do that, he would have scoffed at them. He can think of a lot more interesting things to do in bed.  
  
Then again, when he thought like that, he could walk. And feel things below the waist.  
  
He lies still with sunlight and images chasing each other behind his eyes, and dominating them all is Draco’s face. Stricken and doubting, the way it’s been in the last months, or downcast in forced silence. There are so many things Draco would like to say, but Harry’s stopped him from saying them.  
  
Even now, Harry doesn’t feel bad about that. There are certain things he _couldn’t_ let Draco say.  
  
It would be easy, he thinks, rolling over and feeling as though half his body is made of wood, to collapse into letting Draco take care of him. He wouldn’t try to get up by himself anymore; he would let Draco spell him into the floating chair and cast the spell that relieves Harry of the need to use the loo. He would let Draco stop giving lessons in Arithmancy, even, because he doesn’t need the money.  
  
He’s offered to stay home and take care of Harry “the way he deserves.”  
  
But it’s a temptation, and Harry knows he isn’t good at resisting those. He needs to think about what he _wants_ , not what he’ll do if there’s no one around to stop him. Or to hurry him along in a direction he doesn’t want.  
  
He moves through the day alone, with Kreacher only appearing occasionally, since he has to tend to the house Harry shares with Draco (or shared), too. Harry finds he can do a lot of things with spells. Life alone would probably be impossible if he was a Muggle, but a wizard can manage with magic.  
  
When he successfully casts the charms that heat the water for a bath, the ones that command the floating chair to tip him so he slides into the bath, and the ones that Summon the towels to him, he begins to relax.  
  
He might not want to live alone, but he _could,_ if he had to.  
  
That’s important information to know.  
  
*  
  
And he’s lonely without Draco.  
  
That’s something Harry didn’t expect. The weeks he spent in St. Mungo’s, getting used to both pain and lack of it, hadn’t made him lonely. He would open his eyes and Draco would be there, or Ron and Hermione, or Mrs. Weasley, her face drawn with worry and stress. Harry assumed, then, that he would spend the rest of his life trying to come to terms with what had happened. That didn’t really leave _room_ for loneliness. He would struggle, and struggle, and probably lose.  
  
His mind has been filled with so much loss. He hasn’t thought in terms of triumph, only making the loss less costly.  
  
And Draco isn’t perfect. It took them years to learn to trust and love each other, because of Harry’s pride and Draco’s arrogance—well, all right, Harry can probably call it pride now—and Harry’s unwillingness to lie back and let someone do something that could take advantage of him and Draco’s mule-hard stubbornness about _everything_.  
  
If they lost it, they couldn’t get it back. That was something Harry assumed even when he shivered in pleasure at surrendering to Draco for the first time. It was precious and _fragile_.  
  
Draco lay beside him one evening when they were done and he was tracing the course of a single drop of sweat down Harry’s back. He was murmuring nonsense comparisons between the feelings they shared and various kinds of gems.  
  
“Pearls. They grow out of irritation.”  
  
Harry smiled and turned his head. (He can still see and hear this so clearly, even when the ease of those movements is foreign to him, lying in bed as he is). “And in _oysters_.”  
  
“So?” Draco rolled and let his hand spill along Harry’s shoulder, this time touching a weal. Harry sighed in pleasure. It wasn’t only the pain itself that excited him, but Draco’s delight in wielding the whip. Harry was used to hearing his breath catch long before the exertion would start to affect him. He loved someone who did precisely that for precisely that reason.  
  
He’d found he liked pain, but more than that, he liked being with someone who enjoyed giving it to him.  
  
“Emeralds,” Draco said next, in satisfaction. “Like your eyes.”  
  
“That’s such a _cliché_ comparison, though,” Harry muttered, this time closing his eyes so Draco couldn’t have the pleasure of looking into them the way he wanted when he was rhapsodizing on about their color. “I mean, why in the world do you want to talk about them like that? The witches who send me love letters use that comparison. The _Daily Prophet_ uses it.”  
  
“You’re right, anything Skeeter says is horrible.” Draco sounded a little wistful, though. He flicked a finger against Harry’s earlobe, and Harry jolted and opened his eyes. “Diamonds.”  
  
“I can’t wait to hear _this_ one. At least no one else thinks my eyes are transparent. Or blue,” Harry had to add, because he remembered the blue diamonds he’d helped get back in one of the smuggling cases he worked.  
  
“I wasn’t talking about your eyes.”  
  
“Thank Merlin.”  
  
Draco shoved him hard enough to almost roll him off the bed. Harry dug his elbows into the sheets and resisted. “You ought to be flattered to have a Malfoy talking about your eyes at all.”  
  
“As long as they’re not talking about clawing them out of my head and boiling them, sure.”  
  
Draco snorted at him and went on, “What we have is like a diamond. Because it’s not going to shatter.”  
  
Harry can remember, clear, so _clear_ , the way he brought around his head and stared at Draco at that. “Really? You don’t think it could—anything could break it?”  
  
Draco covered Harry’s hand with one of his and shook his head fiercely. All the teasing was gone from his voice. “No. I mean it. This is the strongest thing I’ve ever felt in my life, Harry. And the most precious. It needs to be guarded, like a diamond is. It could be stolen. But it won’t break.”  
  
Lying in bed now, getting used to the way his memory seems to bring things back to him shining and glinting in ways it didn’t before, Harry slowly breathes in and out. It hasn’t broken.  
  
Maybe it was stolen. But it’s not broken.  
  
*  
  
Harry speaks to Draco through the Floo once a day. They keep away from how much they miss each other, or Harry’s health, or his Auror job. Instead, Draco talks about his student Natalie, and tries for the seventieth or eightieth time to explain the intricacies of Arithmancy to Harry, who shakes his head.  
  
“I never took the class at Hogwarts,” he tells Draco on the thirteenth day, lounging back in the floating chair that he’s turned so he can look out the largest window in the drawing room. “Maybe that’s what you need to do to comprehend it.”  
  
Draco agrees, but absently. Harry glances around and finds that Draco’s eyes are fixed on him.  
  
“Are you ready to discuss it yet?” Draco whispers.  
  
Harry stares back, and says as calmly as he possibly can, “No.”  
  
For a second, Draco slumps, and then he straightens up and shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says. “You should see the kinds of looks Weasley keeps giving me when he Floos in. As though I’m going to cry if something hits me wrong.” He snickers. “I could see him working himself up to giving me a pat on the shoulder yesterday, but he decided against it at the last minute. I’m glad. I can’t see any way that wouldn’t embarrass the both of us.”  
  
Harry has a half-smile on his mouth that he knows Draco sees. But Draco goes right on blithely talking, and the moment passes, and soon they’re deep in a discussion of how likely Hermione’s political changes to the Ministry culture are to actually succeed.  
  
_That’s Draco,_ Harry thinks later, as he eats his way through a plate of scrambled eggs that Kreacher glared at him until he took. _Always pushing the boundaries. I say I don’t want to talk about something, he finds a way to talk about it anyway._  
  
But that’s part of what drew Harry to Draco in the first place, and how they got together. Their stubbornness. Their pride. They share it.  
  
_Do we still?_ Harry thinks, and glances down at his steadily less muscular legs to check.  
  
He’s not sure they do. But maybe they can.  
  
*  
  
One thing Harry finds out is how much more he relies on magic now.  
  
Spells to clean himself. Spells to brace himself. Spells, even, to rearrange his legs, when he’s lying under the covers and the angle isn’t good enough to let him use his hands to really move them.  
  
Draco and the Healers have both said comforting things about how much stronger his arms would get, how he’d be able to lever himself out of bed or around corners or into the chair without the use of spells. But Harry isn’t there yet, so he uses the spells, and looks down at his legs, and gets used to the sight of them.  
  
Gets used to not being able to walk. It’s _hard_ , no one said it was easy, but at the same time, Harry has an advantage in that he’s had to get used to a lot of hard things in his life. Growing up with the Dursleys. Finding out magic existed. Finding out that he was a Horcrux. Living again when he had expected to die in the Forbidden Forest.  
  
This isn’t pleasant. There’s no escape, in the sense that Harry knows he’ll never walk again. But at the same time, there’s a greater sense of escape than there was with the Dursleys or finding out he’s a Horcrux, because he knows that Draco is waiting for him. Ready to come back, if Harry wants. Ready to help him again.  
  
Harry _has_ to be able to live on his own. He has to be able to find some measure of independence, and do things so he won’t pity himself for the rest of his life. That’s what’s hardest, the pity, and the frustration when he tries to get out of bed with his feet flat on the floor and simply _can’t_ do it.  
  
But he’s had experiences of hard fights before, just like he has with getting used to things. He’s going to do this.  
  
*  
  
“Thank Merlin.”  
  
Harry blinks. He came back to the house earlier in the day because he wanted to look around and think and see if he can use the floating chair here as well as he can at Grimmauld Place. There are fewer stairs here, but more corners, and sometimes it’s hard to get the floating chair around those.  
  
When he realized it was getting near time for Draco to come back from his afternoon session with Natalie, Harry decided to stay. He thought Draco might be angry he was there—or not, and Harry trusted his reaction to tell _him_ how to react.  
  
But instead, Draco’s dropped the bag of food he held to the floor, and he comes forwards and traces his hands over Harry’s face again and again, his touch soft and reverent. He kneels on the floor in front of Harry, in fact, and looks up with a face so worshipful that Harry bites his lip.  
  
Draco’s hands fall, but onto his ribs. He isn’t touching Harry’s legs, or hips, although that was the natural place for him to grip—before.  
  
He’s touching Harry where he can feel it.  
  
Harry reaches out and lets his fingers glide down the bridge of Draco’s nose. Draco accepts it without blinking, only looking back with wide, desperate, glistening eyes.  
  
Harry has to look away and clear his throat a bit. He—he knew Draco wanted him back. Of course he did. But most of the time, Draco swats his hand away when Harry touches his nose. He claims that it makes him feel like an Abraxan, and that he never wants to feel that way.  
  
That he’d want to accept it now, because it’s _Harry_ …  
  
“I want to come back home,” Harry says. “It’s been a month, and—that’s long enough.”  
  
“I agree _entirely_.”  
  
Draco rises to his feet in front of him, and Harry looks up. It doesn’t feel like Draco is looming over him. It feels like he’s looming against the demons, against the pain and the hardship that Harry’s had to struggle with. Harry reaches out, and blinks and blinks, and takes Draco’s hand.  
  
Draco seizes him straight out of the floating chair and kisses him.  
  
A month ago, he had trouble lifting Harry on his own, which is another part of the reason Harry practiced so hard with those spells. Now, he’s holding him and kissing him and—  
  
Harry can still feel _that_.  
  
*  
  
Draco turns him on his stomach and spreads his legs for him. And while Harry can’t feel Draco’s hands on his ankles, and he can’t feel the way his legs would part against the sheets, still, he knows what’s happening because Draco tells him.  
  
“The way you look with your knees in the air,” Draco says, and traces the edge of Harry’s bare shoulder with the maddening tickle of his fingers.  
  
Every description below the waist is paired with a touch above it.  
  
“I’m touching your arse now.” The flick of the collar on Harry’s robes, which Draco is holding bunched in one hand, and it’s _just_ raspy enough to make Harry writhe.  
  
“I can see your hole.” The sudden sink of Draco’s teeth into the same shoulder he touched a minute earlier, and Harry half-leaps again. This is the kind of play he and Draco have used before, but he didn’t expect it today…  
  
“And I’m going to _touch it now_ ,” Draco says, and he slices his nails right down Harry’s spine, stopping just above the spot where Harry would lose all the sensation anyway.  
  
Harry bows his head into his arms. It’s more even than the trust he shared with Draco before, trusting Draco to handle his body when it’s like this and tell him what he’s doing, so he won’t lose out on it.  
  
“Your cock,” Draco says. His hand above the waist is pinching and squeezing Harry’s sides, and Harry sobs fearlessly, because yes, now, _now_ he knows he can still feel pleasure.  
  
“Your balls,” says Draco with the kind of fierce relish he’s always displayed in saying things like that. “I’m cupping them.” He scratches again with his other hand, down Harry’s ribs and in a trailing spiral into the soft skin.  
  
“And your hole again,” Draco repeats, his voice gentle, while the collar of the robes falls along the back of Harry’s neck like a half-restraint.  
  
Harry doesn’t think his cock can harden. In fact, he _knows_ it can’t, because Draco would tell him if it was. Harry trusts and believes in that absolutely.  
  
But he can writhe with the almost unbearable feeling of tickling on the edge of pain. He’s always loved having his ribs touched, once he got used to the feeling of Draco’s hands on him at all. His Auror training blares in his head, warning him about how dangerous it could be, how someone could stab a knife straight through his ribs and hit a lung or his heart…  
  
How _Draco_ could do it.  
  
But Draco never does, even as he balances on the edge of hurting Harry in every other way, and it’s thick and rich and _tingling_ in his mind, that trust, that advantage never seized, always held.  
  
Draco orgasms across his back, aiming high enough for Harry to feel it. Harry sighs and shudders and goes on shuddering as Draco goes on touching him, whispering praises that are only half-heard, and all the more beautiful for it.  
  
His skin is just on the edge of oversensitive, but never actually over it, the way he used to get when Draco touched his cock and balls after he came. This goes on and on. It could go on for hours.  
  
From Draco’s tender smile, he plans for that.  
  
And knowing Draco _wants_ to do this, that there are other ways to go to bed and _Draco embraces them,_ lets Harry make the final transition. He trusted Draco with his body before his accident. He trusts him with it now. Before the accident, he went in the reverse order, heart to body.  
  
Now, with Harry’s body fragile and something he _must_ trust others to take care of…  
  
It’s a gift. The same gift in the reverse order.  
  
And Harry flows along with it, half-closing his eyes, turning his head, letting Draco stroke every rib and flick every sensation out of him, trace the articulation of every joint and name it in a pleasured mumble, as he floats and soars and dips into the mingled mastery and surrender that characterizes them.  
  
They will never be the same.  
  
But they will be _them_.  
  
**The End.**


End file.
